Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness

After Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–58, Chinese intellectuals were subjected to "re-education" by the state. In Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness, Ning Wang draws on labor farm archives, interviews, and memoirs to provide a remarkable look at the suffering and complex psychological world of these banished Beijing intellectuals. Wang’s use of newly uncovered Chinese-language sources challenges the concept of the intellectual as renegade martyr, showing how exiles often declared allegiance to the state for self-preservation. While Mao’s campaign victimized the banished, many of those same people also turned against their comrades. Wang describes the ways in which the state sought to remold the intellectuals, and he illuminates the strategies the exiles used to deal with camp officials and improve their chances of survival.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Anti-Rightist Campaign and Political Labelling2. Beijing Rightists on the Army Farms of Beidahuang3. Political Offenders in Xingkaihu Labour Camp4. Life and Death in Beidahuang5. Inner Turmoil and Internecine Strife among Political Exiles6. End without EndConclusionAppendix A: Interview ListAppendix B: Note on the Sources and MethodologyNotesBibliographyIndex

Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness

""In this important, nuanced, and humane account of life within Chinese penal camps, Ning Wang complicates our picture of banished intellectuals by portraying them as complex human beings forced by circumstances to make some very difficult moral compromises.""

- Frank Dikötter, author of Mao’s Great Famine

Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness

""This is the best scholarly book I’ve read about the experiences of those banished to penal camps in Mao’s China. Wang reveals the dynamic interplay between rightists, camp guards, camp officials, and local and central authorities. He also illuminates the long-term human toll of banishment in all of its complexity.""